And if you want to have artifacts you also need a way to build them... Running containers is just one third of the features that docker offers.

Exactly. Containers were around for at least a decade before Docker, just like mp3's were around for decades before the iPod. Docker's simple, efficient way to package containers were the key to their explosion.

> , just like mp3's were around for decades before the iPod

That sounded wrong intuitively, so I decided to look it up: Wikipedia claims that mp3 was initially released in 1993, and the iPod was initially released in 2001, so not decades and not even a full decade.

Thanks for the correction. For some reason I thought that the patents on mp3 compression were issued in the 80's, but there's nothing in the Wikipedia article which specifically says that.

The point stands though, that Docker didn't invent containers by a long shot; but they did make them massively more useful.